Good Thing The NSA Was Listening To This Guy's Voice Mail

Glendon Scott Crawford, 49, of Galway, is accused in a federal complaint of developing "a radiation emitting device that could be placed in the back of a van to covertly emit ionizing radiation strong enough to bring about radiation sickness or death against Crawford's enemies," states the complaint attributed to an FBI agent. Eric J. Feight, 54, of Hudson, also is identified as a co-conspirator and listed in the complaint as Crawford's acquaintance. Feight works for an electronics company in Columbia County. He is accused in a federal complaint of agreeing to help Crawford construct the electronic controls for the device.

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One of the things that has bothered me from the start about this whole NSA surveillance empire that has come so vividly to light is the fact that, 12 years into our national nervous breakdown, we haven't yet developed a functional definition of what terrorism is that would cover every instance of it, but we're pillaging the Fourth Amendment to defend ourselves against it anyway. We have a vague notion, but nothing definitive, and the NSA isn't going to develop one listening to millions and millions of phone conversations or reading millions and millions of e-mails. Also, "terrorism" gets all tangled up in our domestic politics. There are conservative politicians who balk at calling the bombers of abortion clinics "terrorists." (Eric Rudolph, the Olympic park bomber, lived on the lam for years. Was there a general roundup of like-minded people in the North Carolina hills? No.) Meanwhile, at the same time, the FBI was spending gobs of time and money on what it called "animal enterprise terrorism," and the law-enforcement community generally in this country, probably at the behest of the corporate class, went bughouse over "ecoterrorism," which really was little more than unusually destructive vandalism. (John H. Richardson, an Esquire writer, got busted with these guys back in 2003 and got called a "terrorist" by a federal prosecutor, which was not a good thing to be called by a federal prosecutor back then.) Who knows what calls PETA's been making that are now in some NSA bureaucrat's files? This is why I do not believe anything anyone in the government says about transparency and oversight in these programs. They're too big, too undifferentiated, and they serve too many damn purposes at once.

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Now this guy. Or, more precisely, these guys.

Glendon Scott Crawford, 49, of Galway, is accused in a federal complaint of developing "a radiation emitting device that could be placed in the back of a van to covertly emit ionizing radiation strong enough to bring about radiation sickness or death against Crawford's enemies," states the complaint attributed to an FBI agent.Eric J. Feight, 54, of Hudson, also is identified as a co-conspirator and listed in the complaint as Crawford's acquaintance. Feight works for an electronics company in Columbia County. He is accused in a federal complaint of agreeing to help Crawford construct the electronic controls for the device...The investigation broke open in April 2012 when Crawford allegedly went into an Albany-area synagogue and "asked to speak with a person who might be willing to help him with a type of technology that could be used by Israel to defeat its enemies, specifically, by killing Israel's enemies while they slept," the complaint says. He referred to Muslims and enemies of the United States as "medical waste," according to court records. Later that day, Crawford telephoned an Albany Jewish organization, using his cell phone, and made a similar offer, the complaint states. An FBI agent's affidavit indicates that someone at the unidentified synagogue contacted police, who relayed the information to the FBI. At that point a Joint Terrorism Task Force began an investigation.

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